New Sentences: From ‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’

‘Everything screwed up about our culture, it all begins right here.’

— From “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” (Netflix, 2018, directed by David Wain), adapted from the book of the same name by Josh Karp.

This is not a “new” sentence; it has surely been said, verbatim, about several thousand aspects of modern society. That’s why it sticks out amid the dialogue in “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” a biopic about a comedy writer — Douglas Kenney, who spent the 1970s creating National Lampoon and setting the course for decades of comedy — that’s possibly the first thing ever directed by David Wain that isn’t impossibly, uproariously funny.

One obvious problem is that Kenney’s life and work provide a kind of story America has found itself increasingly bored, aggrieved and disgusted by. It’s not just the tale of a Harvard-educated baby boomer who finds great success in doing whatever absurd or juvenile thing he feels like doing, leaving a trail of chaos and disappointment among his intimates. It’s also a snapshot of a moment when comedy’s freshest counterculture impulse was gleefully crass and willfully offensive, built on thumbed noses and middle fingers — what scanned at the time as a liberating response to a rigid and hypocritical culture, but will appear to a weighty chunk of today’s viewers as the childish dregs of an entire cohort’s glib, bratty chauvinism and coddled, almost toddlerish self-regard.

The film’s Kenney makes this “everything screwed up about our culture” observation while considering 1960s high school yearbooks, spotting a comical hollowness and rot in the society he and his peers were trained to join. But today it could be Kenney himself who is a natural symbol of someone else’s rot. It seems nearly impossible to translate the impulses of the one time to the other; the most the film can do is make small apologies for the difference. It might do better to offer a warning to the present: Whatever thrilling, corrective pull your cohort may be having on society right now is very probably, in one way or another, screwing something up for someone later.

Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.

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